


Lost and found

by tonraq



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: But we all knew that, F/M, Gen, ioana the horse, its okay sypha your brain isnt yet fully developed, neither is alucards
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26725534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tonraq/pseuds/tonraq
Summary: Post-season 3.Sypha goes in search of Alucard. A bit of character introspection, with maybe some character resolution? Loneliness can make you do terrible things.Tags updated as I go, because who knows where this will end up.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Trevor Belmont & Sypha Belnades, Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades, past Alucard/Sumi/Taka - Relationship
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	1. One

Sypha stables Ioana and apologizes. Here, just around the side of the castle, the smell of rotting human flesh is not quite so strong, but it is enough that the whites are showing in the mare’s eyes, and she tosses her head every now and then in distress. That, Sypha decides, is going to be her second order of business, just as soon as she has confronted Alucard about the _full-on corpses_ _on stakes_ in front of his castle. She changes her mind: picketing Iona around the other side of the castle, upwind of the corpses, is much kinder. She will stable Iona properly after seeing to the … source of the issue.

 _I also may need to leave in a hurry_. Sypha doesn’t like that thought, but she allows it to sit in her mind, turning it over like a stone, though she does not let it wholly consume her thoughts. She is learning, since Lindenfeld, to take the realities of a given situation and not to obsess over them to the point of – well, the point of becoming Trevor.

Approaching the castle’s stairway means walking past the corpses, and Sypha has to admit that she had not exactly been surprised to see them. Horrified, yes, but not outright shocked as she might have been only a few months ago. After Lindenfeld, it seems that a veil has been lifted and horror dogs her every step, forcing her to see the rot at the heart of things that had been hidden so well before. She had even wondered on and off if the Infinite Corridor had not somehow sucked the remaining goodness out of Wallachia through some unholy arcanity, or infected the countryside with its malice, though she knows this is silly – the Judge had been a child murderer for years before the Night Creature had set up shop in the monastery basement.

Sypha hesitates before the doors to the castle; they are large, imposing, and look heavy. She cannot remember what it was like to open them before, when storming Dracula’s stronghold for the first time; that night is a whirl of fighting and fire and blood and ice. Even in the aftermath, she had not paid much attention to the castle’s décor, awash in triumph and the sobering knowledge of Alucard’s very real grief. Her very real joy was mirrored in Trevor: her sorrow reflected and intensified in Alucard. It had been a blow, his choosing not to join them in their travels, though she had thought she understood at the time. He needed time to be alone; to process what had just happened. Now, she is not so sure as to whether that was really what he needed.

Her hammering on the door goes unanswered, and after several minutes, Sypha takes hold of the handle and cautiously leans her weight against the one side until it creaks open. From what she can see, the hall is completely empty, devoid of anything except the sound of her own footsteps as she enters cautiously. There are no torches lit, nor any of the strange lights from the machinery of the castle itself, so she conjures a small flame that seems smaller still as the door thuds shut behind her.

She is not afraid – not in the conventional sense, anyway. She knows she is perfectly capable of going toe-to-toe with most foes—most vampires, in fact; only Alucard’s speed and short-range sword strokes would be an issue. Sypha is frightened, though, of the very possibility that she may have to come to blows with her friend. Something has obviously gone wrong – very wrong. It seems as if the Alucard she had come to know and love had been whisked away, out of her reach, replaced with vast, echoing silence and sordid violence.

“Alucard?”

Sypha calls, quietly at first, and then louder. There is no response.

“Alucard! It is me, Sypha!”

“Alucard, I want to talk to you! Please, I just want to talk! Alucard!”

She calls his name intermittently as she makes her way further into the castle, going up and down the stairs, in and out of great halls, dining chambers, guest rooms with mussed linens and not much else.

After an hour, Sypha gives up on her search. Alucard is either away, in the Belmont Hold, or does not want to be found. She has no doubt he will know immediately that she is in the castle (Ioana’s conspicuous presence on the side lawn is a bit of a tell) and will, in due course, come to her. Irritable, she goes outside and immediately incinerates the two corpses. _Did they have sentimental value, Alucard? Well, too fucking bad. Your keepsakes are creepy and upsetting to me and my horse_. Sypha is sort of hoping that he will take umbrage with her act and come confront her about it, materializing in that dramatic way that he does, but all that is left afterwards is drifting ash and a few charred bones, and her own temper quickly subsides back into melancholy. _Who were they? What did they do_?

She stables Ioana properly this time, and takes care to rub the mare down and put away her tack. The stables are fairly well-used and smell disarmingly horsey, a comforting mixture of animal and hay that puts Sypha more at ease than she has been for weeks. She is used to being around horses, feeding and watering and combing them and coaxing them into the harnesses for another day of drawing her caravan’s wagons down the road. There is something meditative, almost, to focusing solely on the needs of an animal who hasn’t the slightest idea of what looms over Sypha.

When she can procrastinate no longer, Sypha shoulders her pack and heads up the castle stairs again. She has decided to put her things in one of the many guest bedrooms and enjoy the luxury of an actual mattress that is not made of hay and rough cloth, though the fading light in the west has her wondering if maybe she would not sleep better out with Ioana than in a possibly empty, possibly inhabited by a crazed half-vampire castle. It is too late now, though; she’s halfway down the hallway and committed to her decision. She can always go outside if she cannot sleep, Sypha decides.

She picks a room at random, not wanting to venture down the hallway where she and Trevor had stayed before leaving, the last time. That was near Alucard’s room, and though Sypha is now officially guilty of literal trespassing, she is not yet guilty of emotional trespass. The bed is gigantic, and she indulges in a bit of wistful self-pity that Trevor is not there to keep her company before slamming the lid on that particular line of thinking. She has avoided moping for a week; she is not about to do it now.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sypha is dealing badly with the fallout of Lindenfeld, and Alucard has the gall to not be explaining himself to her.

Sypha wakes slowly, her mind clinging to sleep. Her back is cold – she reaches behind her for Trevor, who should by all rights be cuddling her at every moment but especially this one – and then she remembers.

Lindenfeld.

A glimpse of Hell itself.

The screeches of Night Creatures and the thump of the Morningstar as it rent flesh.

Small shoes.

Night after night of silences punctuated by words turned into weapons and the smell of beer thick on her own breath.

And now she is alone in a castle empty but for the threat of a friend turned monstrous, a situation that she is directly responsible for. Sypha pulls the covers over her head and groans. This was a terrible idea, and Trevor will never come. She feels a stab of momentary, almost physical pain at that. She has lost one of her dearest friends – driven him away with barbed epithets and piercing accusations – and now it looks as though she has lost the other. Grief-stricken, she lies there for some time, hating this world, this life, and hating that she cannot escape from it. _Now we’re living my life_ , Trevor’s voice echoes through her memory, and she buries her head under the pillow, as if that could block out the words and change her new reality.

She had thought at first, after Trevor had left, of going to rejoin her grandfather and friends in her caravan, but realized that that was not a solution to her problem. The other Speakers would welcome her with open arms, with words of comfort, with rejoicing that she was still alive and celebrations to come, no doubt, with the news that Dracula and his forces were routed. But she knew the comfort would ring hollow, the warmth of the communal fire would not reach her, the words of her elders would sound false, and Sypha knows she cannot tell this story. The words are not there.

When the words are not there, the story is not over. Or so the saying goes. She needs enough distance from the whole Dracula affair to order it logically, to make it all make sense – but how can she do that for other Speakers when she cannot even do it for herself? Sypha knows she needs some sort of closure. She had thought, earlier this spring, that she had arrived upon it; that she was ready to turn a series of episodic events into a cohesive narrative, but after Lindenfeld, all of her confidence left her. She holds desperately to the thought that it is not over, that there are other narrative threads at play, that this temporary leave of her Speaker ability to weave sense out of non-sense is a natural effect of an incomplete story.

And so she decided to go to speak with Alucard. After all, he is part of the story as well, and his chosen solitude had not sat well with Sypha ever since they had left him – though she had pushed that feeling down and ignored it, telling herself that her misgivings were a by-product of a cultural upbringing that valued togetherness and community and could not see anything good in self-imposed solitude. But now, alone and lonely, her inborn prejudices have reared their head, chastising herself for not pushing the issue, for allowing Alucard to let them go, for allowing Trevor to leave, for allowing herself to believe him when he said that he would be okay, ignoring the fact that her skills with magic do not make her a mind-reader.

There are too many thoughts in her head, and she is getting nowhere. Sypha pushes the covers back with a frustrated huff, dresses against the cold (even after a summer’s worth of sun, the castle’s air is chill), and heads to the kitchen to boil water for breakfast.

The kitchen is a small alcove on the main floor; cozy and not at all like the ostentatiously large rooms of the rest of the castle. It is fairly well-stocked and a mess: Sypha deduces from this that Alucard is indeed inhabiting the castle because he has to eat sometimes, and that he is terrible at cleaning up after himself. Which is strange, since on the road he was happy to do dishes when she or Trevor did the cooking; maybe that does not translate to fixed domesticity?

Last night, Sypha had skipped dinner in favour of being on edge and anxious, and her stomach was letting her know it. She rummages through the cupboards and finds some bread, butter, cured meat and – hidden away at the back of the spice rack – a small packet of highly-prized tea. She sets to making her breakfast – lunch, almost, by the look of the sun. She should go make sure that Ioana has water, and maybe put her out on a picket to graze.

Alucard does not make an appearance.

She goes to check on Ioana, and then walks over to the gaping maw in the earth that is the entrance to the Belmont Hold. Sypha stops a few metres from it, noting the new pulley contraption for descending and ascending, firmly docked here on level ground. So much for her theory about Alucard have spent all last evening and night and now all morning today in the library. She turns and walks back to the castle, hoping against hope that Alucard would answer her entrance this time, surely. She is met with echoing silence and deserted corridors, once more.

“Alucard? I know you are here, you selfish man! Come out!” 

This is the moment that Sypha's self-confidence, an already fragile, patchwork thing, begins to crumble away. God, but she is _lonely_. She is lonely, and her friends have left her alone despite her pleas for them to talk with her. She wonders briefly if this is how Alucard felt when she and Trevor left at the beginning of summer, then decides that she doesn’t give a fuck about Alucard’s feelings right now because he could have just come out and _told_ them not to leave so if he was lonely it was his own fault and he couldn’t have the decency to just come out and _say something_ to them like an actual adult and instead repressed his feelings until there were corpses on stakes on his lawn, _the absolute moron_.

Anger – self-righteous rage, to be precise – is far more comfortable of an emotion for Sypha to feel. Fine. She has spent enough time asking nicely. Alucard owes her an explanation for all this at the very least. She came here looking for a friend with which to commiserate and was met with rotting corpses as a welcoming party, then ignored by the very person she came to see, regardless of pleading.

She ascends the grand stairway and pivots, walking with deliberate purpose towards what she knows is Alucard’s room. It is at the end of a long hallway, hung with tapestries and dotted with doorways to various rooms; all survived their grand battle with Dracula intact. Other parts of the castle are still ruinous, though Alucard seems to have tidied the debris somewhat, but this part of it is untouched.

 _Was_ untouched.

Sypha narrows her eyes and sets fire to the nearest hanging.

**Author's Note:**

> Easing back into the ol' fanfic-writing hobby.
> 
> Me: hmmm that's barely an ending, more like it's just cut short  
> Also me: *posts it*


End file.
